Process safety continues to evolve as new technologies, emerging risks, and shared lessons shape how organizations protect people, assets, and the environment. At the center of these conversations is the Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS), where professionals from around the world come together to strengthen best practices, exchange knowledge, and advance the discipline.
This year's GCPS marks a significant milestone for the process safety community: the 60th Annual Loss Prevention Symposium (LPS). As the first and longest-running symposia within GCPS, LPS serves as a cornerstone for sharing technological advances, lessons learned from incidents, and emerging approaches to loss prevention across industries.
To celebrate the occasion, a dedicated 60th LPS Celebration Session will reflect on how the discipline has evolved while looking ahead to the challenges and responsibilities facing today's engineers. We spoke with Manuel Herce, Trey Morrison, Katie Mulligan, and Jatin Shah—volunteers and Session Co-Chairs of the 60th LPS Celebration Session—about the legacy of LPS and what they hope this anniversary inspires in attendees.
As LPS marks its 60th anniversary, what stands out to you as a defining moment or shift in the evolution of loss prevention?
There isn't a single moment but a series of events that bring home the reality that loss prevention professionals must never become complacent. One defining shift over the life of LPS has been the transition from primarily descriptive, incident-focused learning to using computational analysis to more predictively assess systems and engineer solutions that reduce the risk of loss prevention events.
In the early decades of LPS, the program's backbone was sharing detailed case histories, fires, explosions, runaway reactions, and catastrophic releases so others wouldn't have to "learn the hard way." That emphasis on learning from incidents remains foundational, reflecting LPS' core purpose of combining hard-earned lessons from investigations with innovative technological advances to assess the consequences of hazards and manage process risk.
What has changed over time, and stands out most clearly when you look across decades of LPS proceedings, is how the community gradually moved from "this is what happened" to "this is what could happen, and here's how we model the consequences and design safeguards to prevent it." Topics like consequence modeling, quantitative risk assessment, engineered safeguards, and more recently, digital tools and advanced analytics have become central. That evolution reflects a maturing discipline that's still grounded in hard lessons but increasingly focused on foresight rather than hindsight. Yet as we get better at assessing and managing risk, it becomes harder for loss prevention professionals to resist organizational complacency and keep designed mitigation barriers from degrading over time due to neglect. The result? Catastrophic incidents continue to occur, often when multiple risk management barriers have eroded. We think the conversation needs to center on the role our profession can play in ensuring that the sense of vulnerability is communicated throughout the organization.
How did you approach shaping a celebration session that reflects both how far LPS has come and where it's headed next?
The guiding principle was balance: honoring the roots of LPS while being honest about the challenges and opportunities ahead. In short, the session was shaped to say: this is where we came from, this is what still matters, and this is where responsibility now shifts to the next generation.
Historically, LPS has been about sharing experience to prevent serious incidents involving fires, explosions, runaway reactions, and major releases—a purpose explicitly stated in LPS committee operating procedures. We wanted the celebration session to visibly reflect that legacy by acknowledging the people, papers, and ideas that shaped how modern process safety is practiced.
At the same time, it would have been a missed opportunity to make the 60th anniversary purely retrospective. The current LPS program already emphasizes emerging risks, new technologies, and novel approaches to hazard identification and risk assessment. The celebration session was designed to look forward as well, highlighting how loss prevention must continue evolving in response to energy transition technologies, digitalization, and increasing system complexity. We have a panel focused on the adoption of AI into our field that discusses the opportunities and challenges it poses and what guardrails we may want to operate within going forward.
Looking back over the past six decades, what lessons from loss prevention do you think are still especially relevant for engineers today?
Several lessons stand out as timeless. First, fundamentals matter: An ounce of prevention is always worth a pound of cure. It starts with good engineering that accounts for the inherent hazards of the chemistry, respects energy, designs for credible worst cases, and builds in safeguards that are independent and reliable. No amount of advanced modeling compensates for weak fundamentals—a reality reinforced time and again in incident investigations presented at LPS.
Second, learning from incidents is not optional—it's an ethical obligation. LPS was founded on the premise that sharing lessons openly can prevent future harm. That principle remains as relevant today as it was in 1967, especially as industries adopt new technologies where operating experience is still limited.
Third, loss prevention is a system problem, not a single discipline problem. Over time, LPS has expanded beyond purely technical design topics to include human factors, organizational learning, emergency response, and decision making under uncertainty. This reflects a hard-earned lesson: catastrophic losses rarely result from one failure alone.
When attendees leave the 60th LPS celebration session, what do you hope they feel encouraged or inspired to do?
We hope attendees leave with a sense of stewardship.
LPS has endured for 60 years because generations of engineers believed it was their responsibility to contribute, by sharing hard lessons, challenging assumptions, and advancing the state of practice. Today, we have amazing tools and capabilities that allow us to evaluate the hazards of the most complex processes and their associated risks. We have a vast library of collected knowledge about potential hazards, ways to eliminate or reduce risks, and proven safeguards. We want attendees, especially younger professionals, to recognize that LPS is not just a conference they attend, but a community they are expected to shape.
Practically, we hope attendees feel encouraged to:
• Bring forward real problems and lessons from their own experience.
• Engage critically with new tools and models without losing sight of fundamentals.
• Contribute papers, discussions, and mentorship that will define what LPS looks like at its 70th anniversary.
If attendees leave thinking, "I have a role to play in what loss prevention becomes next," then the 60th celebration will have done its job.
Learn more about the 60th Loss Prevention Symposium at the 22nd GCPS. Registration Information.
Looking to strengthen your process safety foundation? Learn more about the CCPS Process Safety Fundamentals Certificate Program (CCPSf) and start building your Risk Based Process Safety knowledge.
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